Top Ten Book Openings

Lucifer (Sons of Old Trilogy #1)
by Annabell Cadiz
Publisher: Self-Published
Release Date: January 31st 2013

Synopsis:

Have you ever wondered what could be hiding in the shadows?

Well, for eighteen-year-old Zahara Faraday, she doesn’t have to wonder. You see she comes from a lineage of Light Witches, those who have chosen to help protect and serve between the supernatural world and the human world. The only problem is Zahara, like her father Solomon, is as human as a human being can be whereas her mother, Mia, and her Aunt Catalina, were born as Light Witches. As a family they hunt down rogue supernaturals—creatures who harm humans or who have committed an act against their kingdom. 

Zahara’s hunting skills are usually kept dormant since her parents would prefer she live life as a normal human girl without knowledge of the supernatural world. She plans on doing just that—except when she finds a couple being attacked by fairies, she has no choice but to step in. Before she can return to pretending to be blissfully ignorant, Zahara encounters a problem she isn’t the least equip to handle: Bryan Hamilton, the good looking new co-worker she has to help train. In a heartbeat, her best friend, Becca King, has set her up on a double date with herself and her new crush, Rekesh Saint-Louis, who happens to be the most powerful leader of the biggest Imago Coven in South Florida –supernatural creatures with the ability to control water . . . and suck out human souls. 

Zahara has no time to focus on how she’s going to explain her double date with her best friend and the enemy they have a tentative truce with to her parents because soon one of the members of Mia and Catalina’s coven is found murdered with a strange tattoo of a snake with wings carved into his arm.

Zahara is then thrown into a whirlwind battle with an angel determined to have revenge against God, an Imago coven she doesn’t think they should trust, and slew of dream-eating fairies and powerful Nephilims, hybrid children of angels and humans, more than happy to rip her to shreds.

Normal just got a deadlier definition.

by Annabell Cadiz

An opening sentence or paragraph to book is where the beginning of where a reader and story connect. It’s crucial to start off a book with just the right tone, the right mood, the right atmosphere to get a reader to continue. A first sentence, a first paragraph holds a lot of weight. A reader can often tell if a book is worth continuing based on how it opens. 

Usually, when I pick up a book, I’ll read the first line or sometimes the first paragraph then the last sentence and that’s how I decide whether or not I’m going to buy the book (or borrow it from a library). There’s a lot of power in those beginning words.

Here are some of my favorite openings to some really great books:

10. From Of Poseidon by Anna Banks—“I smack into him as if shoved from behind. He doesn’t budge, not an inch. Just holds my shoulders and waits. Maybe he’s waiting for me to find my balance. Maybe he’s waiting for me to gather my pride. I hope he’s got all day.”

9. From Rebel Belle by Rachel Hawkins—“Looking back, none of this would have happened if I’d brought lip gloss the night of the Homecoming Dance.”

8. From Perchance to Dream by Lisa Mantchev—“It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ Mustardseed said, flying in lazy loops like an intoxicated bumblebee, “‘that a fairy in possession of a good appetite must be in want of pie.”

7. From The Warrior Heir by Cinda Williams Chima—“The scent of wood smoke and roses always took him back there, to the boy he was and would never be again.”

6. From I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter—“I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear. Well, that’s me—Cammie the Chameleon. But I’m luckier than most because, at my school, that’s considered cool. I go to a school for spies.”

5. From It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini—“It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint—it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.” 

4. From Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl—“There were only two kinds of people in our town. “The stupid and the stuck,” my father had affectionately classified our neighbors. “The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. Everyone else finds a way out.”

3. From How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True by Sarah Strohmeyer—“There was no getting around the fact that Tinker Bell was a little bitch.” 

2. From Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes—“She’d never killed before tonight.”

1. From The Dark Half by Stephen King—“Cut him,’ Machine said. “‘Cut him while I stand and watch. I want to see the blood flow. Don’t make me tell you twice.”

Born and raised in the sweltering suburbs of South Florida, Annabell Cadiz grew up fine-tuned to the cuisine of various Spanish cultures, learned to master the art of Puerto Rican cooking thanks to her parents, and learned to converse crazy thanks to her band of siblings. She is now working toward attaining a B.A. in Psychology at Trinity International University to better understand how to converse with the weirdoes and crazies of the world. (After all, she is one of them.) A self-proclaimed nerd and a book-a-holic (her room holds dozens of shelves with much evidence to prove that her claims are indeed true), she created TeamNerd Reviews along with her best friend, Bridget Strahin, to showcase their EXTREME love for all things book related.

She published her debut novel, Lucifer (Sons of Old Trilogy #1), in January 2013. The second novel, Michael (Sons of Old Trilogy #2) will be released on May 28, 2014. And the final installment in the Sons of Old Trilogy, Nephilim, will be out in Summer 2015.